Journal Entry: Skocjan, Slovenia

86 Richard Jackson Journal Entry: Skocjan, Slovenia Sooner or later we are all sitting on top of nothing. This whole town rests on a scarf of rock that drapes across the huge dome of a cavern. Sooner or later everything surrenders to this porous limestone and drips down into the crevices of the past. I remember how the boy who fell into another crevice years ago thought he had turned into the pure air of nothingness. That was before I sat in the cockpit of my uncle’s B-47 bomber and imagined what they meant by making sinkholes out of cities, before today’s news that the four decoy children left in a Baghdad car created a crater larger than their futures when the bomb went off. It is so easy to make nothing out of something. Roughly 74 percent of the universe is nothing, dark energy, 22 percent is dark matter, leaving only 4 percent that we can see. Here the cliffs are becoming night, the stars seem to burrow out of them, sooner or later the stones will be dreaming of wings. They will be dreaming of dissolving into the tentacles of water that reach for miles. Even the algae carpets this ancient cistern’s water in moonlight as if it were the top of an emerald. It is nothing but algae, no oxygen, and no fish can live there. Because the universe is expanding sooner or later there will be only more nothing. Is that why the more we try to embrace the less we can hold? Is it possible to want nothing at all? Does that mean the less we love the more we can keep? The village women tend their gardens in the sinkholes they call dolina that were once ancient burial sites. Maybe everything is only the nothing we can know. Zero wasn’t invented until around 300 BC by the Babylonians. Now we think the universe was created out of vacuum 87 Richard Jackson energy, that is, out of nothing. In the vacuum of space you couldn’t hear these words. But here the cuckoo seems to warn us that we need to do something sooner than later. It’s up to us to imagine. This morning, when the falcon screeched us away from his nest in these cliffs he was steering us away from the emptiness of the gorge. All he knows is how to begin. All I can do is place your hand in the cavern of my own. ...